One More Movie for Paul Newman

Paul Newman says he may appear in one more film before retiring for good from the film industry at the age of 81.

The star of The Sting, Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is currently top of the US box office with new film Cars, in which he voices a surly, talking 1951 Hudson Hornet.

Newman said he was currently considering what his final work would be, and had a project in mind. “I will probably have one film left in me,” he said. “Thelast hurrah. It’s time. When it’s time to get out, it’s time to get out.”

Big screen appearances have been few and far between over the last decade for Newman, whose most recent outing before Cars was as the mob boss John Rooney in 2002’s Road to Perdition, for which he was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar. He won his only Academy Award, bar a 1986 “honorary” gong, in 1987 for the pool hustler tale The Color of Money, alongside a young Tom Cruise.

All in all Newman has appeared in more than 50 films, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that his first big screen outing might well have been his last. The actor was so mortified by his performance in 1954’s costume epic The Silver Chalice that he took out a full-page advert in a trade paper apologising to anybody who might have been unfortunate enough to view it.